On November 15th, the Woodstock Forum took on the topic of lay-Jesuit collaboration in higher education. That the question is more than academic was illustrated earlier this year by the naming of John J. DeGioia as the first lay president of Georgetown University. His appointment - and his place within the Jesuit tradition - turn light on the vision of collaboration outlined by the most recent (34th) Jesuit General Congregation held in 1995. That congregation focused on the desirability of Jesuits working for, with, and under non-Jesuits in ministry, declaring (in Decree #4), "We foresee the expansion of lay apostolic leadership in Jesuit works in years to come and pledge ourselves to assist this development." What are the challenges facing the Society of Jesus and the laity in this era of collaboration? What are the stakes in this encounter for the Church and its mission in the world? Speaking to these and other questions were Dr. DeGioia, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick of Washington, and Howard J. Gray, S.J. Dolores R. Leckey of Woodstock moderated the discussion, an edited version of which follows. Full texts will soon be published.

Dolores R. Leckey is a senior fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center, where she is working on two books related to Catholic leadership. Spiritual Exercises for Church Leaders will be published by Paulist Press in 2002. She formerly directed the Secretariat for Family, Laity, Women, and Youth, at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

This topic is certainly of importance to this university, the oldest Catholic institution of higher learning in this country. But it is important, in fact, to all Catholic colleges and universities and widely applicable to those institutions founded by religious orders. It is of great importance to the Church at large, because we are talking about the way the Church now and in the future will carry on its mission. And the method of doing so certainly looks like it's going to be laity, clergy, and vowed religious bonded in what we might call an authentic collaboration.

We are situating the development of this collaboration in the 34th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus (1995), the shorthand for which is "GC 34." The General Congregation is a very important event in the life of the Society of Jesus. It is the highest authoritative assembly for the Society. But events like that just don't happen. There is preparation, and I was very surprised in December 1992 to receive a letter from Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, asking me to comment on the preparatory papers for the Congregation. He asked me if I could concentrate on the lay-Jesuit collaboration segment. He also wanted me to consult with other leaders who were knowledgeable about the laity. And he wanted a report, a critique of the study paper. And he wanted all this right away.

I guess you know my answer. What would you do if Father Kolvenbach wrote to you? We did our best, consulted, and were happy to be part of that. And the rest, as they say, is history. Lay-Jesuit collaboration is a very important part of that General Congregation and our life here at Georgetown, and indeed the life of all Jesuit institutions.

Theodore Cardinal McCarrick was installed as Arch-bishop of Washington on January 3, 2001, after serving as Archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, for 14 years. He has chaired the Committee on International Policy, as well as the Committee for Aid to the Church in Central and Eastern Europe, of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Ordained to the priesthood in 1958 in New York City, he has served in various capacities for The Catholic University of America (of which he is now chancellor), and is formerly president of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico in Ponce.

I think I've been here at Georgetown eight or nine times in the less than a year that I've served the Church of Washington. My presence here is not as an outsider, but rather as someone interested in, excited about, and supportive of this university's work, anxious to see it continue to touch the lives of its constituents in the deepest and most profound way.

Georgetown and any great and authentically Catholic university must always have three characteristics. It must be continually striving to be the best, it must be honestly and genuinely Catholic, and it must always be open to the service of the poor. These are the marks of any great Catholic institution. In the Ignatian tradition, they are surely the marks of any great Jesuit university. I will always work with you to help you continue to make these the fundamental marks of Georgetown.

The mission statement of Georgetown University reads: "Georgetown is a Catholic and Jesuit student-centered research university. Established in 1789 in the spirit of the new republic, the University was founded on the principle that serious and sustained discourse among people of different faiths, cultures, and beliefs promotes intellectual, ethical, and spiritual understanding. We embody this principle in the diversity of our students, faculty, and staff, our commitment to justice and the common good, our intellectual openness, and our international character. An academic community dedicated to creating and communicating knowledge, Georgetown provides excellent undergraduate, graduate, and professional education in the Jesuit tradition - for the glory of God and the well-being of humanity. Georgetown educates women and men to be reflective lifelong learners, to be responsible and active participants in civic life, and to live generously in service to others."

Forgive me for reading it all, but I think it gives a sense of the extent and the depth of the commitment. The first line of the mission statement is the heart of Georgetown's identity. When we say, "Georgetown is a Catholic and Jesuit student-centered research university," we say it all. Obviously as Archbishop of this Church of Washington, I am particularly interested in the Catholic character of this student-centered research university. Catholicity both with a small and a large "C" is developed in the sentence that immediately follows - that the university was founded on the principle that serious and sustained discourse promotes understanding. The key word, of course, is "discourse." Discourse - serious and sustained discourse among people of many faiths, cultures, and beliefs - does promote understanding and this is conducive to the achievement of the university's mission.

Knowing Thy Self. What are the marks of serious and sustained discourse? I submit that there are two most important characteristics: first, the secure possession of the truth of one's own position, and secondly, the openness to explain and expose that truth in a manner that is respectful of the positions of other people, while welcoming and appreciating their positions. It is necessary for us to know who we are and what we believe before we can enter into a productive dialogue with another. Just as someone who teaches arithmetic must accept the ordinary principles of mathematics in order to be effective, so someone whose identity is modeled substantially by his religious faith and commitment, must also find a way to express that part of his spiritual and intellectual life if he is going to be useful in the discourse. To say it more simply, perhaps: to enter into effective discourse, one must know who he or she is, must be comfortable in what one professes to be the truth, and must be able to project that faith and reality in dealing with others.

Truth in packaging demands, therefore, commitment to understanding the principles of Catholicism and Jesuit heritage so that the mission statement may spring from the pages to the real life of the institution. This certainly does not mean there is no room at an institution such as this for other currents of thought, other principles, or the followers of other religious faiths. On the contrary, the world in which we live, if it is to be replicated in the university setting, must be represented in the life of a great university. But in the life of a great Catholic and Jesuit university, among those who are of the family of the faith, there must always be clarity about what the Church teaches, and fidelity to what the faith demands.

Secondly, the kind of discourse that is proper to a university will also always demand a certain fidelity to the respect for the human person, which is fundamental to Catholic teaching and the Ignatian tradition, and to the ordinary principles of learning and knowledge. Teachers, students, and all those in the Georgetown family must have a deep respect for each other, each other's faiths, each other's positions on issues, each other's political, economic, and social views, so that the discourse can take place in an atmosphere of cordiality and mutual concern, never abandoning the principles of right and wrong, but understanding them in the context of our society as we begin the third millennium. The dialogue fostered and impelled by this discourse, to be successful, must be as Bernard Lonergan, the great Jesuit theologian, used to say, "attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible," if it will ultimately form community and lead to progress both in intellectual advancement and in human development. Dialogues like this must be carefully designed, constructed, and facilitated. The Jesuit Community, which has indeed been called "a communications system," might want to think about proposing such a design as part of lay-Jesuit collaboration.

Next, the mission statement speaks of the Jesuit character of the university as "an academic community dedicated to creating and communicating knowledge." It also repeats the religious tone of the first section of the statement - that this is done for the glory of God and the well-being of humankind. The great St. Irenaeus spoke of the glory of God as the human being fully alive. The great command of the gospel to love God and love one's neighbor may be expressed in the reality of today's world as a command to love our neighbors close at hand and even those half a world away. For that reason, Jesuit education and the essence of the Jesuit mission is human- centered and person-centered, because essentially it must be God-centered. It must prepare men and women for service to their neighbors because of the ultimate reality of all human life, which is the love of God.

Those who are trained by the Jesuits, educated to be "reflective, lifelong learners," to be "responsible and active participants in civic life, and ultimately to live generously in service to others," must be as Father Pedro Arrupe, the great former Jesuit General used to say: "persons for others." How important this is for Georgetown and all those who are part of the Georgetown family. How essential it is that Georgetown never lose this tremendous concept of what it is and what it always must be. The world in which Georgetown finds itself today is one in which values are founded and mutual relations are developed on the basis of respect for people. I believe this can only happen if this respect has a solid religious foundation. If it is open to a reality beyond that which we can touch and measure and shape, Georgetown can teach us to look at this reality because it has in its foundational memory the great fathers and doctors of the Church, the great initiators and missionaries of the Jesuits, the great patriots and founders of America, because this is part of its history and its life. Georgetown can serve in a way that few institutions are able to match. This is the glory of Georgetown; it is also its challenge.

Dr. DeGioia comes to this with a deep faith, a lively academic curiosity, a splendid intellectual training, and a knowledge of this institution far and above what anyone else might have. In a sense, he is the embodiment of that committed layman which the Second Vatican Council, in its decree on the laity, promoted and admired. When the fathers of the Council saw the need for great and generous lay people to accept leadership in the Church, they were thinking of people like John DeGioia. When they speak of the need for laymen and laywomen to become more intimately involved in the life of the Church, the Council fathers present us with the same challenge that Georgetown University has presented its new president. It is almost as if they are describing this good man and excellent scholar.

Howard J. Gray, S.J., is rector of the Jesuit Community at John Carroll University and assistant to the president for mission and identity. He formerly served as the first director of the Center for Ignatian Spirituality at Boston College. Holding graduate degrees in English literature, philosophy, and theology, he has taught at Boston College, Fordham University, Loyola University of Chicago, Loyola University of New Orleans, and the University of Detroit Mercy. In September, he conducted a workshop on lay-Jesuit partnership for five Jesuit universities in the Philippines.

I want to emphasize three aspects of the Jesuit mission vis-à-vis lay leadership. First of all, there is a history in this relationship between Jesuit and lay. Secondly, there is a document that links this history to the present reality of Jesuit service to the Church. And third, there is an orientation towards the future development of lay leadership within Jesuit-sponsored works and ministry, including of course, Jesuit higher education and Georgetown.

The History. Now I'm not using history in the technical sense. It's not a chronology and it's not simply an insight into events. I mean history in the Ignatian sense of talking about the internal dynamic of any reality - what really operates within this relationship of person-to-person, person-to-culture, and cultures among themselves. The background touches on the early Jesuits' way of proceeding, a phrase that means their style of going about the work they tried to accomplish for the sake of the Church. It's almost impossible to read the history of St. Ignatius Loyola and his early companions without realizing that one of the formative experiences was their encounters with lay confraternities. Those lay confraternities have a very complex history. But basically, they were groups of men and women gathered together either for mutual support in their Christian identity or out of their Christian identity for the corporal and spiritual works of mercy for other people. They were very influential both within the context of Ignatius' own religious development and later on the Society of Jesus. The early Jesuits used existing confraternities in order to redirect or reorient the lay members but also as models for the way in which they them-selves would try to integrate two great movements within the Catholic Christian experience - your own growth before God and the way in which you reach out and help other people to grow in their understanding of God, the apostolic thrust as well as the contemplative. They also saw the power of establishing confraternities, especially as their own early mission called them to a kind of spiritual nomadic existence, moving from town to town, from frontier to frontier, from country to country - how do you keep something sustained? You establish a confraternity to continue your presence after you've left. So the confraternity was both an influence and a tool in the life of early Jesuits and they were lay confraternities.

But what I want to underscore is that there was a harmonization of these two influences - the confraternities that consisted primarily of sustaining the religious life of their members and the confraternities that were oriented towards a dynamic of reaching out and helping other people. What the Jesuits saw was the need to bring both of these together so that you had a contemplative religious community that found the height of its own contemplation in the moment of action - of helping other people. That reality of bringing together out of a lay experience a peculiar religious purchase on that experience is very important in understanding the Society of Jesus. We have a great deal of history of the Society of Jesus about how it differed from religious orders. We don't have a lot of stuff about how the Society of Jesus integrated in its life the experience of being lay, but that's a very important part of its own character, personality, and dynamism. In our own time, lay leadership has grown. It has moved beyond presence and support as board members, faculty, professional staff, and administrators begin to take over the direction, the spirit, the élan of many of the colleges and universities and do it in their name, but out of an Ignatian inspiration.

So from the very beginning of the Society of Jesus, lay people had a very intimate part in the dynamic and growth of the Society. Their response and inspiration, their dedication and effective integration in the mission, explained to the Jesuits what they were doing and who they were and how they could operate. And it is that mutuality that makes up the enduring context of history that we identify as the Society of Jesus. We're not bringing lay people in. They were in from the beginning. What we're doing now is recognizing in a far more profound way that they have leadership in that mutuality.

The Document. At the time of the 34th General Congregation, a group of Jesuits working on how they could massage this document on lay participation thought there was something missing. They were talking a great deal about how important it is to have lay collaborators, colleagues, and co-workers. But something didn't seem right. And finally in conversation, some were saying: we're talking about lay people helping us but that's not what the future is. It's whether lay people will let us help them. That's the Church of the future, which in many ways, as the document underscores, will be the Church of the laywoman and layman. Can we be the kind of people whom they can trust, who are capable of helping, who will be loyal in sustaining that help, and will be creative in the way in which they share who we are and what we have? That was an amazing change of perspective and you don't understand the document if you don't understand that. It was talking about the Society of Jesus placing all of its resources at the disposal of the lay community within the Church.

What do we offer you especially? First, our spiritual heritage. Secondly, our educational resources. And thirdly, our friendship. Can we now share some of that and have it in turn modified by the experience of laywomen and laymen who work with us? Can we take this whole centrality of being sent on mission and the importance of unity and not only share it but learn from lay experiences of work, marriage, and parenting, so that we are mutually enriched as well?

In this relationship, discernment becomes pivotal. How can we make a Christian judgment together about the directions we want to take in the works that we do together? The message of the General Congregation is that from this point on, it's impossible to think ever of Jesuits isolating the direction of their work outside the context of collaboration. No collaboration, no real discernment. If you don't discern with your lay colleagues as a Jesuit, you become a lobby. When you discern with your colleagues in your ministry, you become a community.

A Future of Hope. "Spiritu, corde, et practice" char-acterizes a Jesuit ministry. Jesuit-lay colleagueship is a spiritual movement, operating out of the inspiration of the Spirit. Its affective integration, corde, is basically a gift of God in which we can see our life as having direction, purpose, and meaning. We can talk about the ways in which God has guided us in our lives and understand finally there are things that God has asked of me that God does not ask of someone else. There are gifts and talents I have that are meant to be used in a specific way and are not meant to be used by someone else, and my affective integration is the highest experience of my freedom. Now how can we share that together? And how can we do that practice, in a way in which, through the great diversity and plurality of God's gifts, we form a union together, one body, one spirit in Christ?

At the beginning of the decree on Jesuit-lay cooperation, it's stated very clearly: We live in the hope of our cooperation. This is a loving hope - a movement that more than anything else marks the spiritual friendship that should exist between Jesuits and laity. We work together for something not yet fully realized. The hope of the university and the love that it supports can never be contained within its own walls. That's hoarding, not donating. It's an educational movement that Father Kolvenbach, in his two recent documents on higher education, has reminded us must be social in its orientation. This education must say that every gift requires me to serve someone else with that gift. Every advantage I have, precisely because I have been privileged to be educated, means that I have to worry about the ignorance of someone else. My heart has to be broken by the fact that someone goes hungry at night and will never have an opportunity to live in a way in which that person knows security, safety, and understanding. And how do we do that unless we do it together? Unless we do it not as an accident, but as a radical orientation of the education we have at a place like Georgetown. So the union we are talking about is a union we model as mentors for our students, showing them that people with all kinds of talents, energies, and vocations within the family of the Church can work together. That mentoring of mission is perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give, precisely by working as lay and Jesuit together in the ministry of education.

A little over two weeks ago I was at Regis University in Denver, attending a meeting of lay and Jesuit personnel entrusted with promoting the Jesuit character of our colleges and universities. One of the people who had been corralled to drive us back and forth from the motel where we were staying was a faculty member. I got to talk to him two or three times and finally he said, "You know I'm not Catholic. I'm an Episcopal priest. But I've been working at Regis for 13 years." I said, "That's interesting. I'm going to be involved in this conversation [the Woodstock Forum] and I'm wondering what you would emphasize about Jesuit and lay cooperation, what you've learned." He replied, "What I've learned is, first of all, the importance of trust. I could never have grown in my own faith if people did not trust that out of my religious tradition, I have something to give. And I've always been invited to give it. Secondly, I hope you also tell them I've learned from Jesuits the sacredness of the world. There is a lot in my own tradition that made me very suspicious of this world. I felt that somehow or another it could rust out my spiritual lungs. But the Jesuits kept showing me I should not be afraid of the world because God is working there even when we don't see it. We just have to take enough time to look. And thirdly, the Jesuits have taught me that we ought to have service together. There's no reason for doing anything we're doing if somehow or other we don't make this a better world."

I said, "So you've learned all that from the Jesuits?" "No," he said. "They were the occasion for it. I think I taught them as much as they taught me. But what I think is important is that we discovered it together." Well, Dr. DeGioia, welcome to the age of discovery.

John J. DeGioia became Georgetown University's 48th president on July 1, 2001. He held various leadership positions throughout the university for more than two decades before becoming president. He graduated from Georgetown College in 1979, received his doctorate in philosophy from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and is a faculty member of the Department of Philosophy.

What are the unique challenges faced by a lay person considering such a role as leader of a Catholic and Jesuit university? Clearly there are multiple ways of proceeding. Here we privilege the Catholic and Jesuit, and yet the university is what I've referred to as a community of communities. The contemporary university must provide room for a wide range of what we call "interpretive communities." Each of us might find a particular perspective assuming prominence at different points in our life: psychoanalysis, historical materialism, Cartesian dualism, phenomenology, deconstruction, social construction, idealism, realism. There are countless ways of making sense of the world, innumerable ways of interpreting our reality, all of which find adherents on our campus. All offer clues and insights that may have and may continue to resonate deep within us. Part of the responsibility of the contemporary academy is to provide a place for these varied interpretive communities

Original Defining Communities. One element of a way of proceeding has to do with the notion of background. Or, to borrow a term from the eminent philosopher Charles Taylor, a horizon of significance. In any way of proceeding, certain values and goods have primacy. What differentiates one way from another is the background context against which we establish value. This background exists independently of us. We don't choose it. In time, we can come to understand the nature of this background and begin to make choices and adjustments of our position within it. But as Taylor contends, we begin always in an original defining community, which comprises a set of goods that enable us to make meaning of our experience in the world. Another word for the framework provided by an original defining community is tradition.

The second element in a way of proceeding derives from our awareness of tradition, our place within a tradition. We are given an orientation in a defining community. As self-awareness of our place within that community grows, as we begin to understand the nature of our commitments within that community, we can begin to evaluate the quality of that tradition as well as the nature and implications of our participation in it. As Alasdair MacIntyre has taught us, we engage in a tradition through social practices. McIntyre defines a practice as "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity incorporating both achievement and standards of excellence." As we live the social practices that comprise our lives, we continually adjust our orientation and social space. So our orientation evolves constantly as we achieve a deeper and deeper self-awareness, as we discover new aspects of ourselves and our world. In that context, we make choices that influence the nature of our orientation. The crucial dynamic of a way of proceeding is the evolving nature and the synergistic relationship between our ever-adjusting orientation and the tradition in which we are situated. After all, traditions are not static. They are not fixed. They may evolve in response to our engagement as we seek authenticity in our lives. The search for authenticity, which Taylor describes as the dominant question for the modern era, is inextricably linked with the meaning and development of traditions. In the academy, we recognize that every individual has a history of an orientation within an original defining community. Now what differentiates a Catholic and Jesuit university is the primacy, the priority, the privilege given to a specific way of proceeding, a specific tradition. While we will defend and sustain a plurality of perspectives at the university, we privilege the one that has animated this community for more than two centuries. This tradition is much older, but no less dynamic for its age, and it is characterized by the Latin inscription on our shield - "utraque unum" - meaning "both ... one." Engaging this creative tension, we seek to provide a context where both reason and revelation can come together, where both nature and grace can be united, where both faith and reason can become one. Our tradition holds that there is a transcendent reality, that God is present in this world, God is present here tonight. Our tradition holds that the Holy Spirit is present, in the words of Father Brian McDermott, rector of the Georgetown Jesuit Community, "here to guide and sustain us as we receive life from others and bring life to others."

Our tradition encourages certain practices to sustain that giving, practices of worship, reflection, spirituality, justice. This tradition comes alive in these practices, in liturgy, in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, in approaches to theology, social thought, and anthropology, in service and acts of cura personalis. We ask members of this community for commitment to engage this privileged tradition, this privileged way of proceeding. Engaging a tradition like ours is not something that one can dabble in, nor does it demand the engagement of all members all sharing the same level of intensity all at the same time. It does demand respect and recognition of the privilege given to this way of understanding and organizing our reality. And I believe we place greater demands on the leader of such a community. We ask that the leader of a Catholic and Jesuit university ensure care and attention to the development and extension of the tradition that provides its authenticity, its distinctive character.

From Within the Tradition. A year ago tomorrow, I was interviewed by the search committee for the position of president. The question I lived with for months afterward truly altered my orientation, my own way of making sense of reality. Could I, a layman, accept responsibility for leading this university? It took time to shape the question properly. I read with care the documents described by Cardinal McCarrick and Father Gray, reflected on them deeply. In the end, the question emerged for me: could I as a layman get inside the tradition? In fact, was I already inside the Catholic and Jesuit tradition of this institution? Could I take responsibility for immersing myself in the logic that set the trajectory of this tradition? Could I live the questions that shape this tradition today?

Well for me the answer was "yes." It's what in philosophy we call a metaphysical question. No amount of external evidence, no amount of objective data would ultimately resolve matters for me. In the end, it was a process of discernment. I'd been raised in the Church and in this community with an understanding that laywomen and laymen would be expected to take on new responsibility for the future of the Church and the future of communities like this. I did not know how that responsibility for me would be manifested. I certainly didn't expect it would be as president of this university. But last year I came to realize that this idea of responsibility had shaped my orientation since I was just a boy and was part of what oriented me in social space.

I found that the greatest gift I was given by the Society of Jesus was to share their spiritual heritage. I was guided for many years by a spiritual director, the late William Sampson, who never, not for one moment, led me to feel that I was in any way odd for pursuing the spirituality of St. Ignatius as a layman. I am most grateful that I came of age at a time when the spirituality has been accessible in unprecedented ways. Men like Bill Sampson, Howard Gray, Brian McDermott, and others, have unlocked the possibilities of this spirituality that were unavailable to earlier generations. These experiences gave me the confidence that I could get inside this tradition and live the tensions and problems, the concerns and constraints that characterize the contemporary context for our tradition. The fundamental challenge facing any leader is how do we respond to the challenges faced within the tradition. Every tradition is characterized by a current problematic, a set of issues that are a block to extending the tradition. What do I mean? Within any tradition, we recognize ways in which we are not living up to our promise, where the richness and possibility can be developed further, make a greater contribution, provide deeper meaning in our lives. Without embracing these opportunities for development, we will never become the kind of place, the kind of community, the kinds of people we're meant to be.

The Challenges. As I look at our tradition, I see four specific challenges. First, in the opening passages of the fourth decree of the 34th General Congregation, there is special attention given to "the need to address the importance for our mission of the Gospel and culture." In Decree 4, we are encouraged to support a mutuality of engagement so that we can provide a context in which the Gospel introduces some-thing new into the culture, and the culture brings something new into the richness of the Gospel. This has been a defining challenge for our tradition and remains so as we move into this new century.

Second, I mentioned earlier the university's commitment to sustain pluralism. Well, there is a counter influence as well, and this is fragmentation. As a culture, we are not as confident about the unity of knowledge as we once were. Nor do we even agree about the meaning of that concept. Yet in our tradition, we do believe that things hang together, that there is a coherence understood ultimately in religious terms. A crucial engagement within our tradition involves this tension between pluralism and unity.

Third, as recent events have illuminated, interreligious dialogue is a crucial dynamic for extending our tradition. It is imperative to seek bridges of understanding that supersede centuries of failed if not hostile relations among divergent faiths. If we face a future marked by a clash of cultures, rather than a clash of nations, the need for dialogue among religious faiths becomes all the more urgent.

In 1973, Father Arrupe laid the groundwork for our fourth challenge by calling on educators to undertake rigorous self-evaluation and above all make sure that in the future, the education imparted in Jesuit schools will be equal to the demands of justice in the world. For Georgetown, the service of justice means engaging harsh realities head-on, knowing that the questions they raise about our priorities or our wealth as a country and as a community will sometimes make us uncomfortable.